Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, July 8, 2011

More Of The Same

Probably the most controversial thing I've ever written is that the evidence for the effect of health insurance on mortality is not really that strong. This is not to say that insurance has no effect--this is possible, but not to my mind particularly likely.

That's right, America! You don't need health insurance because being able to go to the doctor will make no difference in your life.

Do we really need to discuss any other part of this post? McArdle is being paid to propagandize for the elite who do not want to pay taxes for social services. Her readers don't care about the truth because they also do not want to pay taxes and they have health insurance. McArdle's masters will get their way because they hold all the power; McArdle's sole purpose is to prevent any violence against her masters by convincing Americans that nobody needs social services and we can't afford them anyway.

Meanwhile, she takes her taxpayer-subsidized health insurance and taxpayer-subsidize mortgage deduction and taxpayer-subsidized itemized deductions and six-figure salary and lucrative fellowships and speaking fees and per diems and laughs, laughs, laughs all the way to the bank.

Fighting propaganda is a losing game. It can be amusing, which is why I do it, but it is frustrating and emotionally debilitating. Also, I need to take a break and work on my book, tentatively titled Supernatural Teen/Young Adult Adventure With Romance, Psychological Overtones, Lots Of Humor, And A Badass Demon.

21 comments:

McM's post is devoted to claiming that the just-released Oregon study is a "rorschach blot" in which people read whatever they want to read.

From the Abstract: "We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group."

From the NYTimes report: "The study is now in its next phase, an assessment of the health effects of having insurance."

Quick follow-up, just because it bugs me: I suspect McM wrote her response to MattY without reading what he based his comment on (a Slate report on the original study) let alone the foundational document; and I'm certain that her commenters (I scrolled hurriedly) assault MattY based only on what McM wrote. I therefore invite y'all to attack McM's commenters based on my description of what they say based on her description of what he said, based on someone else's description of what the report said. Meta enough for the morning?

It would also involve her admitting she made a mistake or was wrong about something. That never happens. Her intellectual inferiors misunderstand her point, her calculator is broken, etc. But self-reflection and any remote recognition of her personal shortcomings isn't something I'll ever expect from that satisfied twit.

They say that when the Nazis invaded Russia, Soviet radio broadcasts every night told of how the Red Army was heroically hurling back the fascist invaders. Only listeners who also owned a map were able to determine that the sites of these Russian victories always seemed to move closer and closer to Moscow.

I believe that in her past life, Megan was a Soviet radio broadcaster.

The most controversial thing she's ever written is her assertion that non-violent anti-war protestors should be clubbed with two-by-fours. That one is so screamingly obvious that to claim otherwise is clearly an attempt to pretend she never wrote it.

That's true. At the very least she should give us a short list of her worst atrocities and let us decide for ourselves. I would add her Iraqi Body Count to the list and my favorites, her attacks on Elizabeth Warren.

McArdle is still shilling this horseshit? Well, she kept trying to defend her order of magnitude calculation error, so I shouldn't be surprised.

While HIV/AIDS is also a factor, it's not exactly a goddam secret or surprise that countries that only offer out-of-pocket health care, where most people never get to see a doctor, consistently rank the lowest in life expectancy. It's not as if the data was unavailable to her. Apparently, McBargle doesn't believe in going to the doctor herself, since receiving medical care has no significant bearing on a person's health.